On 1st November, we welcomed Dr  Hossein OLYA from the Sheffield University Management School, who delivered a half-day workshop about Complexity theory and Configural modelling using fsQCA.

Dr OLYA is the Interim Head of Marketing and Cultural and Creative Industries at Sheffield University Management School and serves as the associate Editor of International Journal of Consumer Studies. He has extensive experience of applying fsQCA in travel and tourism research and had made a considerable amount of publications in high quality journals including Tourism Management Journal, Journal of Business Research and Journal of Travel Research using fsQCA.

Dr OLYA mentioned that social phenomena involve dynamic, nonlinear, interactive, and complex processes and powerful theory and pragmatic methods should be applied to study complex social phenomena. He further emphasized to model social complex phenomena we need more than statistical analysis. He later used practical examples to address three questions of why, when, and how to use a combination of complexity theory with fsQCA in business and management research.

The workshop was organized by Dr Sanaz Vatankhah from the department of International Business, Marketing and Tourism.